


In Stitches

by Christie_Cavedish, foreignobjecticus



Category: Blake's 7
Genre: Aliens, Angst, Body Horror, Experiments, M/M, PGP, Surgery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-02
Updated: 2020-11-02
Packaged: 2021-03-09 06:42:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,255
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27346816
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Christie_Cavedish/pseuds/Christie_Cavedish, https://archiveofourown.org/users/foreignobjecticus/pseuds/foreignobjecticus
Summary: Fill for Whumptober 2020 Day 31: Experiment/left for dead. Avon is captured some time very soon after the events on GP and experimented on by some rather inept Andromedans before he is dumped back where he was found.
Relationships: Kerr Avon/Vila Restal
Comments: 9
Kudos: 4





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> A bit of a quickie whacked out over an afternoon and tidied up with a wire brush and a thin coat of paint.

The room around him was stark white and silent, broken only by the infrequent, rhythmless hum of some distant machine. Avon’s eyes opened slowly, flickered, shuttering out the harsh light of the examination lamp above his head. He lay still and listened, and when he was sure there was no one else in the room, shot bolt upright - and _swayed_. Clutching at his throbbing head, Avon grit his teeth against the unexpected ache in his brain, letting his equilibrium stabilise. When he was finally steady again, a great electronic voice echoed around the room. 

“You are in a self-contained observation dome. You are safe. You will be monitored and studied.”

“Who are you?” Avon shouted up at the ceiling, then craned his head in all directions. But the room’s walls were smooth, unbroken by any sign of windows or doors; even the join between the walls and floors was smooth and graded, sealed without an edge to pry open. Avon was stuck, like a lonely fish in a fishbowl. His heart rate increased, pounding in his chest as unbidden panic rose. A monitor on the far wall began to flash.

Avon saw his captors for the first time several hours later, presumably after they’d had their fill of watching him pace around his new cage. He had walked around the room a hundred times, hunting for seams in the flawless walls, poking and prodding the monitors set into the recesses, trying to open their insides and pull out the wires; something, _anything_ , to find a way out of his confinement. The devices that were spread across the room were totally unknown to him, and none showed obvious seams or gaps to open. But five years with Earth’s best lockpick had taught him well, and as Avon examined one of the larger units, his clever fingers ran across the hidden switch that unlocked it. He opened the device and pulled the cover free, and just as he’d begun to peer into complex wires inside, some unknown sound came from the wall behind him. 

“Ah,” Avon said into the device, dropping the cover to a table by his side. “I knew that would get your attenti-”

He hadn’t expected aliens. Stupid really, he thought as he fought the urge within himself to flee. There was nowhere to go, after all, except _towards_ the creature. 

“You are not meant to open the monitors,” the cool, monotone voice of the alien matched the voice he’d heard before - and it was a chilling sound, especially given the mouth of the alien was… well, at first glance there wasn’t much of a mouth to speak of at all. The alien before him was bipedal, taller and thinner than an average human, but the skin was blue and tight across its sharp skeleton. The head on its rounded, ill-defined shoulders was triangular with one large organ stretched across its face reminiscent of the compound eye of some hideous insect, but the effect on human-like limbs made it so much more disconcerting, like a monster drawn out of the depths of an Old Calendar horror vizcast. It quirked its head, studying Avon from the other side of the room, and he noticed with a little burst of confidence that the thing didn’t seem all that inclined to come closer. Although his meddling with the monitor had drawn it inside, it was still cautious. _Good_. 

“I was bored,” Avon explained away his behaviour with a facetious, curt reply and wondered briefly whether his tone of voice would be enough to convey his meaning. 

“Then we will provide you with entertainment,” it replied.

Well, evidently the connotation was lost on it. 

“Please replace the cover of the monitor.”

“No.”

Avon stood steadfast, heart pounding at his boldness, and a sheen of sweat began to break across his skin. The alien tilted its head further still, and a small sunken mandible extended from the lower portion of its face. The insect-like protrusion nattered, sharp jaws scraping against one another producing a fine, high-pitched resonance that made Avon’s eardrums ache. It wasn’t painful, at least not _yet_ . Presumably, the sound was just a warning. Avon fought the urge to clamp his hands across his ears as the sound grew higher still, piercing into his head, and when he twitched involuntarily, the alien _purred_ . Its mandibles stopped moving, and slowly, _grotesquely_ , it retracted its mouth until the lower portion of its face was smooth and featureless once more. In the silence, Avon’s ears still rang. 

“Please replace the cover of the monitor. We do not wish to hurt you.”

This time Avon complied, careful not to turn his back on the alien as he worked. When he was done, the creature nodded in an imitation all too human. 

“Thank you. Entertainment will be brought to you shortly. Please wait.”

With that, the alien was gone. Disappeared without a trace. It was so fast, so smooth that Avon almost doubted his own eyes, but the creature had been there. Or had it?

A selection of items were brought to Avon’s cage not long afterwards: everything from playing cards to books, datapads, children’s toys, utensils, sponges and things Avon was almost certain were supposed to be recreational aides. But in those few items, the aliens had shown their weakness; they had no idea what he, a human, would find most amusing. On closer examination, the playing cards they’d supplied were short three queens, and the books given to him were all Old Calendar, written in languages long dead and forgotten even to the few historians who remained in the Federated Worlds. The datapad was broken, though it still held charge - presumably enough that the aliens had assumed it worked as it was meant to - and the children’s toys were garish and pointless to an adult. Avon picked up a brightly coloured flyer, complete with tiny pilot, and toyed with the thing for a matter of seconds before the door snapped under his fingers. 

“Proudly made in the Federation,” he muttered under his breath and dropped the flyer back to the table. He didn’t even bother looking at the things the aliens had given him from the kitchen, instead passing over to the last items that might even hold his interest _if_ he didn’t know his every action was being monitored. 

Avon glanced around the room again, casting his eyes over the smooth white walls. Even though there was nothing to see, he knew that somewhere beyond the cage, at least one hideous compound eye was staring at him, probably unblinking, judging his every move - watching how _he_ blinked and breathed, how his singular ocular organs worked in tandem with his head to view his world in a way that was probably as foreign to the aliens as compound eyes were to him. Avon’s lip twitched and he felt a cool shiver run up his spine. This place made him feel like he was back in the London Dome Zoo, but instead of staring into the cages like the inquisitive child he’d once been, he was the anteater, the parrot, the snake and the baboon, sitting sorrowful in its cage, staring back at the faces of a hundred other people sneering, tapping the glass, impatient to watch him move, jump, roar, _do something!_ He wouldn’t give the aliens the satisfaction. 

Looking down at the last two items on the table, Avon quirked an eyebrow and wondered whether the aliens were scribbling down notes furiously at his apparent reluctance to touch. He didn’t know how clean the things were, after all, and there wasn’t a sink or receptacle for him to wash them in (nor was any receptacle of any kind; but that issue hadn’t presented itself as a problem yet). The items in question were unnaturally shaped, and Avon had the sneaking suspicion that they weren’t designed for human anatomy. The two pieces were made of a soft, pale grey silicon, each piece a foot long and flared on one side, hollow on the other. The second one was much smaller and clearly had something in the way of buttons on it, but that was as far as Avon could gather without touching them. In a pinch, he supposed, they could be used for human pleasure. He wasn’t going to find out. Instead, he took up the broken datapad and sighed. He had no probes, so the work would be slow, but at least he could spend some time fixing it instead of inspecting the walls yet again. 

Some time during the night cycle in his cage, while Avon dozed uneasily, the alien slipped into the room and injected him with the first of many drugs. Now that they had observed their test subject in control, it was time for the experiments to begin. 

Days presumably turned into weeks in Avon’s cage, and as he was tested and monitored, memories returned to him slowly, piece by piece. Kept as he was under an ever-lasting haze of drugs and viruses, the visions he had of his recent past filtered through only as snatches at first, competing for attention in his addled brain. Alien compounds and creations that altered the mind and made his body sweat and shake forced him to forget the past. And once he was ill, once he’d been pushed body and mind to the limits of human endurance, he was forcibly cured by other drugs that sometimes dulled his senses, other times made the world so sharp and focussed it felt like each thread in the clothes upon his back might slice through his skin. As he rose and fell gradually from the undulating hazes of sedation, he began to remember things that gave substance to the nameless anxiety that twisted in his gut. Being locked up wasn’t new, and beyond the usual sense of dread that underlied every experience he’d had of being held captive, there was something _else -_ something _bigger_ \- that his brain kept seeming to want to remind him of but didn’t have the decency to supply the details. 

Clarity only trickled back in the brief hours of respite between tests, and although at some point Avon realised he’d remembered this all before, each time he recalled it his body broke out in a cold sweat and his heart rate soared, bringing the aliens to him faster than he could stop himself from feeling the panic that rose in his throat. _Gauda Prime_. Perhaps the aliens took his sudden bouts of panic to be normal, or perhaps they thought that his body’s reaction - in between the tests - was a lingering effect of the drugs they’d used on him. Whichever it was, sooner or later, Avon reasoned, it would affect their data; render his use as a test subject null and void. And then there would be only one use for a damaged lab rat. 

The alien that had been attending him all these weeks came in early one day, not long after the light cycle in his cage had started. Instead of coming close to run its tests as always, the alien simply stood expectantly by the far wall that was- _open_. 

“Come with me,” it commanded in its placid, toneless voice, and Avon was immediately piqued. The change in routine was unusual, and a flurry of thoughts clouded his mind even as he fought to keep the word off his lips, still under the effect of some cure they’d given him the day before. Ultimately, he failed, and he spoke before he’d realised what he’d said.

“No.”

He blanched, and the creature’s hidden proboscis began to extend-

“Why?” he carried on in a hurry, hoping to stall the creature. 

“Do not ask questions.”

“I want to know where we are going.”

“It is none of your concern-”

“Isn’t it?” he asked, eyes wide, and the same damned wall monitor that beeped incessantly suddenly whirred to life, alarm sounding. 

“Do not increase your heart rate.”

“I just want to know where I’m going,” he pleaded, shocked by the fear in his own voice. He knew the alien didn’t understand his tones, so he tried for simpler tactics, a small part of him hating himself all the while but he needed to make the creature listen, make it _understand_. “I’m scared- I can’t control it. My heart beats faster when I’m scared.”

He didn’t realise he was panting until he’d stopped pleading, and his chest continued to heave as he watched the alien’s head tilt and the proboscis slowly disappear back into its smooth face. The door behind it dissolved and before it left, the creature spoke four words that made Avon shiver.

“We will be back.”

Avon paced the room for hours afterwards, worked into a frenzy by the fear that had consumed him. The food the aliens had given him yesterday had been inedible and, coupled with dehydration from a lack of potable water, he was feeling weak by the time the next meal came. Mercifully, it looked edible, and a careful taste of the stuff revealed it was likely some sort of omelette or other scrambled _something_ that Avon didn’t want to know about. Scooping the meal up with his fingers, he devoured it hastily, and it was only once he’d finished and gulped down the tall glass of purified water that he realised there was an unpleasant, _bitter_ aftertaste to the food he’d consumed. But so far, he didn’t think he’d been fed anything that was obviously poisonous, and the aliens had shown no signs of trying to actively harm him without some cure that was arguably worse than the illness it produced. So Avon tried to think nothing of it and returned to the new datapad he’d been given. He didn’t even feel whatever drug it was working on his body, and when he slumped sideways to the floor, he was already asleep. 

Waking up was a fast process - much more so than any human anaesthetic managed - and so when Avon’s eyes shot open and he found himself in a completely different room from where he’d been mere seconds before he was understandably panicked. He tried to move, arms snapping to the surface beneath him, legs propelled him from the table-

But he didn’t move. He felt his arms; they did what he wanted, felt them move as he commanded them to, as they _should!_ But they didn’t - his eyes didn’t lie even if his mind did. And his heart pounded in his chest too fast, _much too fast_ \- enough that it must be setting off the monitors that bothered the aliens so much-

But it didn’t. 

He was stuck, numb, and for the moment still he thought he was deaf, but there _was_ a sound, faint, soft and organic. 

Avon blinked up at the ceiling, or rather he _thought_ he did; his eyelids didn’t seem to want to shutter over the vision of the bright white lights above him, but he could somehow still move his eyes. And so he watched as a hand, blue, with more fingers than it should, trailed across his line of sight, vicious scissors poised, and sank into his abdomen. His eyes followed, and over his thin chest he saw the jaws of the scissors opening and closing in his stomach, past the pinned flaps of red skin stretched open wide, and heard the unmistakably visceral sound of meat sliced through.

He couldn’t scream.

*******

Vila wandered between the trees of Gauda Prime, trying to distract himself in the fresh air of the green, fragrant springtime. Three months had passed since they’d reached the planet, and three long months had dragged on by without Avon by his side. Vila remembered precious little of the fight they’d had in Blake’s old base. He’d survived, escaped with little more than a scorched wound on his spine that had healed well enough. Blake - well, the doctors he’d recruited were good, that was for sure, but there was only so much they could do. He was back up on his feet, prancing around the secondary base like nothing had ever happened, but Vila knew that beneath his scars and smiles, there was pain. There was _so much pain_ in all of them. Avon’s disappearance marked a part of their lives Vila was fast losing hope he would find closure for; Avon was gone without a trace. No note, no body, no ransom from the Federation, nothing. Avon always said he wanted to be free from Blake, Vila recalled in the moments when he sank deep down within himself, and now Avon was free of him too. 

Vila shook his head vigorously in the crisp morning air to banish the thought from his mind and turned his eyes back down to the roots of the bushes around him. While the new base was still being established, there was little for him to do besides menial work that he avoided as a rule of thumb. But Blake had insisted he do _something_ , and so for the past few days Vila had been wandering the woods nearby, hunting mushrooms for the kitchens. He’d even helped cook once or twice, and it was a welcome distraction. 

So it was almost ironic that if he hadn’t been foraging in the undergrowth, Vila wouldn’t have found the very thing that had been plaguing his thoughts and chasing his dreams, turning them into nightmares while he slept. He hadn’t expected for a minute that he’d find him so close to home, or find him at all, but when Vila stumbled upon the cuff of a shockingly familiar leather jacket, his heart skipped a beat, and when he dropped to his knees and pressed his fingers to the cool skin of the wrist lying limp inside…

His heart rose in his throat at the merest flutter of a pulse beneath the sallow skin, and he was frozen for a few seconds, mind racing over the knowledge of what he’d found. But his Avon didn’t respond, and though he couldn’t see his face through the undergrowth, he knew Avon must be asleep - or unconscious - and for the time being, there was little he could do to move him alone. No, he needed help, and he needed it fast. Vila stood, leaving his basket of mushrooms a few paces away and gave Avon’s wrist one final glance before he sprinted back into the woods. 

In the bush beside the basket, Avon stared into the canopy of trees above and cried _Vila!_ , but no one heard him. 

_Perhaps it was all a dream?_ Avon rationalised in his mind as lay there alone, slowly drifting from another timeless slumber, hearing the rustle of leaves and the beat of boots on the forest floor pound ever further from him. 

Pain began to swallow his body, tingling in every limb, pins and needles that grew stronger as the minutes passed. He lay and waited, patient, for the moment his pulse and breath might stop, and realised he wouldn’t be so lucky to die from a quick mercy killing. There were bounty hunters here, he recalled vaguely, that could kill him and sell his husk for credits. Or maybe whatever vicious animals stalked the ground would find his body, open, inviting, and gnaw at him until he didn’t feel anything anymore. Then he might be of some use for something in the galaxy, beyond a failed experiment, beyond a failed rebel, robber or lover. 

_Strange that my mind has never been as quiet and clear as it is in this moment. If only the pain would go away. I am so, so tired. But I saw his face… one last time; a good dream, after all. Goodnight, Vila, if you are still alive, though I doubt it. Just another memory. Maybe it is time to finally sleep._

Vila’s face burned upon the back of his eyelids, and he felt the softest touch of fingers against his smiling lips. A good dream indeed.

When Blake and the others reached the place Vila had left marked, they stood gazing in all directions, confused. 

"Where is he?" Blake called as Vila caught up, puffing harder than the others as he'd run to the base and back in as much time. Next time, he promised himself, he'd take a comms unit. 

"He's here!" He panted out and happily dropped to his hands and knees, crawling into the bush where Avon lay. Above him, Blake leaned in and parted the leaves. His stomach turned. 

"Vila… I don't think…"

But Vila had gone still, head hidden inside the plant where he'd worked his way in to find Avon's face. Stony brown eyes stared back up at him, unblinking, dry to the point of having lost their shine and gone almost cloudy. If it hadn't been for the little flicker, the way Avon's pupils followed his, gaze unerringly caught, he'd have sworn he was dead. 

"Avon?" Vila breathed against his face and brought a hand up to touch the cool, white lips that had parted for silent breaths. Vila ignored the words being spoken above him, shut out the worries Blake was dragging forth for a moment while he held still over the prone body. He felt a tremor under his fingers pressed to Avon's face, and slowly, sculpted lips curled into a death mask smile.

Once again, time seemed to skip for Avon, and the instances between seeing Vila's face in the forest and that same face framed by harsh white lights connected as if he'd merely blinked himself away. He was lying on a medical table, and again he felt his heart begin to hammer with fear he wished he'd never known. He shivered in his mind, ready in his own way for the gruesome horror, the loneliness of isolation within his own body betraying him. But then the monitors beeped. 

They _screamed_ . He thrashed. He was alive, and he was _dying!_

Relief never felt so sweet, and Avon fell back and let himself drown in the comfort of knowing he was within himself again, in control of his body even for a few more moments before he could let himself die. But the monitors were his enemy, and their cry brought doctors - human ones - scurrying around him like ants to a piece of carrion. And in between those faces, anonymous and dark, was the one person he thought he'd never seen again.

"Vila…" he whispered, and when the face above him replied he was shocked to find it real. It was a slow reckoning, but when Vila pressed a mask to his face against the hot flush of tears on his cheeks, realisation dawned: he was back, and he could _feel_. 

"Avon- Avon please stay awake!" 

The oxygen mask on his face dug into his cheeks, pressed so tight it hurt, and the fiery burn in his abdomen grew and grew as hands he couldn't see seemed to be sewing him up. Others grabbed his arms and slid needles beneath his skin. Vila jostled above him, pushed and prodded out of the way of the doctors, but he held steady, his voice oddly calm in the cacophony around them.

"Stay with me, Avon, please." He didn't beg, he didn't have to; Avon didn't have a choice in this.

"You're going to be alright. You always are. You're so strong - be strong for me again," his voice dropped, face leaning in closer as someone shifted his body beneath and Avon screamed in pain. He didn't recognise his own voice, if it had been him at all. His vision failed.

"When you're better, we'll go to Del 10. You promised me that, and you still haven't delivered. Look at me, Kerr. Look at me. Don't let your eyes wander. _Look_ ." _Look where in the darkness?_

He hadn't realised he'd been drifting, but he was only dimly aware of the latest needle that pierced his skin and flooded his veins with something cool and numbing and _oh so wonderful_ , he almost begged for more. 

"No, that's enough." He did beg, apparently.

"You're going to be fine, you're going to be alright. You're going to live…"

"...and I told Blake it was probably best that we organise the new comm units before wandering about, but he was more worried about getting Avalon's ships to the new base so he wasn't listening when-"

"Does he ever?"

His voice was barely more than a whisper, and his eyelids were still closed tight, but it was enough to stop Vila's ramblings right in their tracks and that was a rare thing indeed. Avon tried to smile. 

"Did you speak, or am I dreaming again?" Vila asked, and Avon realised the usually soft and cheery voice he expected had gone hard and maudlin. With an effort, Avon forced his eyes open. It took a few seconds to adjust to the light, but eventually Vila's outline sharpened and brought the man out into stark relief against the ugly grey walls of the room. Avon felt a tingle in his palm, only faint, and looked down to see fingers entwined with his. He tried a few times before he managed to squeeze, but when he'd got it right he felt Vila squeeze back, and that was what it took to make him really smile. 

"You didn't dream it this time, but I can't speak for before," Avon whispered. 

"Welcome back," Vila replied. "Don't ever do that again."

"Do what?"

Even now, days after having found Avon in the woods, they still hadn't been able to work out what had happened. But Avon didn't know that. 

"You know what."

Avon frowned, and Vila explained. 

Blake came by Avon’s cabin later that day, bringing with him Orac and acting for all the world like it hadn’t been years since they’d spoken.

“He’s been utterly inconsolable without you,” Blake smiled as he placed the computer on the bare desk and held out Orac’s key. Avon took it and turned the plastic box slowly in his fingers, comforted in some way by the familiar shape and weight in his palm. For the last four years, Orac’s key had been a fixture on his person, the thing that he felt for when he patted his pockets down after a fall on a planet, the shape he sought between the folds of his leathers when he paced late at night and busied his hands, something to worry. The weight of the key hadn’t been lost on him, all those weeks in the alien’s cage. Having it back now was relieving in a way that was different from having Vila by his side, or even Blake standing over him. Somewhere along the way, he had remembered Gauda Prime, the first base, and thrice-felt itch of his trigger finger that, stupidly, he’d scratched. 

“I’m glad to see you didn’t die,” Avon said, dropping Orac’s key to his lap and covering it protectively with his hands.

Above him, Blake snorted and his own hand wandered almost subconsciously over his belly. 

“No point in beating around the bush, then?” he laughed even when Avon scowled, and it felt good, like they were already slipping back into the uneasy camaraderie that had marked their first year together on board the Liberator, now so long ago. 

“I find I’ve less and less patience for small talk as the years creep by,” Avon paused to watch as Blake settled himself down, uninvited, into the chair Vila had occupied that morning. “Enough time is wasted with pleasantries as it is, and I’ve increasingly less time now than ever before. But perhaps,” his lips flickered into a brief smile, “that is true of all of us. How did you survive?”

If it had been anyone else by Avon’s bedside, the mood would have turned to ice with his words, but with Blake it couldn’t quite freeze over. Instead he huffed, warm breath thawing the tension Avon brought with him, and Blake ran a hand over the edge of his shirt, toying with the fraying hem as he hesitated. 

“That weapon you brought with you was good; at close range you very nearly did kill me. Was it your intention?”

This time, Avon actually looked away, but he didn’t reply.

“I survived the same way I have for the past few years, since Epheron; I hid, pretended I was dead, and hoped that when the first wave of Federation troopers had cleared out that none of them would recognise me enough to take my head as a trophy prize. When they were gone, some of my men dragged me to safety, I’m told,” he conceded with a nod of his head, “gave me blood transfusions, and operated when they had the chance. The rest-” Blake shrugged, a substitute for the end of his story. Avon nodded. 

“You still did a good job,” his voice rose a little louder and he straightened up in the chair, loosening his gold belt and pulling open the lower half of his threadbare shirt. Beyond the expanse of smooth chest lay a tangled mess of red and raised scars, criss crossing over his abdomen, angry and hot. Avon stared, and the longer his eyes traced the marks on Blake’s body, the deeper the coil of guilt that wound in his own gut. He felt a twinge of pain despite the drugs in his system, and he was sure it came from nothing more than empathy for the suffering he’d caused. 

When Avon opened his lips to speak, he found his mouth bone dry.

“It was a mistake.”

“I know.”

“Do you?” 

Blake pulled his shirt back across his body, and for the first time Avon realised the man looked much more pale and sallow than he had been back in the first base. He’d only seen him for a minute, hardly noticed more than the ragged scar across his face and the clothes of a man that he never thought Blake could be, but now he had time to really see him. Blake did not look well. 

“How long did they give you?”

Blake’s eyes widened a little, shocked at the perspicacity that Avon could employ even when he was ill and tired himself. It was refreshing, in a way, to have been seen through so quickly, and so Blake didn’t deny it when he pursed his lips and responded.

“A year, maybe two if I don’t push myself. If we can find a proper cybersurgeon - Docholli, for example, if he’s still alive - well,” he rolled his eyes up to the ceiling, calculating a remote possibility Avon knew was purely for show, “maybe closer to seven, depending on what he did to me. You aimed well, Avon,” Blake brought his eyes back down from the heavens and smiled a bitter smile that Avon hadn’t ever seen on his face before. It didn’t suit him at all. “One way or another, you did it.”

Vila came back later that evening after dinner carrying a small box under his arm that rattled as he stepped. Avon eyed it with suspicion and cocked a tired eyebrow when Vila dragged a small table over to the bed.

“What are you doing?” he finally asked, and was pleasantly surprised when Vila slid open the box to reveal a dark, mottled chessboard and a jumble of hand-carved pieces. 

“You know you never win?” he smiled faintly and reached out for the black king, turning the piece over in his hands. Vila anticipated his question. 

“One of the kids Blake has in his team carved them. He’s made a few sets that float around. I thought you might like to play?”

“Blake’s recruiting children now?” he placed the king down squarely in place and frowned. Vila shrugged.

“A lot of them came from the farms here… they didn’t have anywhere else to go, and they couldn’t get through the blockade. They want to fight-”

“Is that what Blake’s told you?”

Vila scowled and dropped into his chair, bumping the table as he went. 

“You still don’t trust him, do you?”

“I have not been given any reason to the contrary yet-”

“No, you haven’t,” his voice turned to steel. “And you won’t for a while; not until you’ve healed. Don’t judge Blake without the facts, Avon; you know that’s unfair, and you’ve never liked to take wild stabs in the dark. You don’t know what’s happened here-”

“Not yet-”

“Not yet,” Vila agreed. He held Avon’s gaze for a moment before turning back to the chessboard and lining up his little light pawns one at a time. “I’m sorry-”

“Don’t be,” Avon interrupted him, and he looked back up into dark, shining eyes. 

For a moment they stared, and Vila’s eyes glittered with something that Avon couldn’t quite fathom, but in the next moment he had looked away, swallowed whatever was clawing its way up his chest, and said no more. 

They set up the pieces in silence, and Vila opened the game the same way they’d played a thousand times: the Ruy Lopez; the move Orac had made him play against the Klute so many years before. Avon moved his own piece, countered, forced Vila out of the safety of his pawns; predictable. They played almost the same moves every time, and just as Avon was growing disappointed with the same old turns, Vila changed tactics, threw his bishop into a trap, upset the balance of pieces Avon had set up on his side of the board. Avon paused, hesitated, moved his rook-

Vila took his queen. 

“Are you going to tell me what happened, wherever it was you were?” Vila mumbled into the board, grasping Avon’s queen in his hand and leaning against his closed fist. He looked casual, or tried to, but there was tension in his jaw that wouldn’t slacken and the way Vila played told him he had been plotting, laying his pieces down precisely - for once, every move was intentional. 

“It wasn’t pleasant. I don’t think you’d want to know.”

“I might surprise you.” He moved forwards, took one pawn with another. Avon huffed out a little smile. 

“Just because you want to know now doesn’t mean you’d like to once I’d told you. You can’t forget, Vila. Dorian’s wine taught you that.”

A low blow. Avon moved, and Vila took his king. 

“I’m done with forgetting.”

Avon dropped his hands back to his lap and turned from the chessboard with a pained grunt. The position he’d been twisted in hadn’t helped his stomach, although it was healing faster each day. But the pain was a reminder, and as he let his gaze drift towards the concrete ceiling, memories of the stark white cage flashed in his mind. The humanoid, blue aliens with insect eyes and hidden mouths, the way they appeared out of nowhere, silent footsteps, watching him even when he felt so alone in the bleakness of his prison. A thousand compound eyes, too many fingers clutched around instruments above him, the slow approach of a triangular, featureless face-

“Avon- breathe, it’s okay-”

“NO!” he wailed, shaking off the hands that had grasped him, thrashing in his bed with all the force of the terror that consumed him. He could move, he could breathe, he could think and feel, and the pain of those instruments slicing through his flesh rent his torso apart like he were living it all again, and he screamed. Screamed _so loud_ he thought his lungs might give out, hoped they would rather than let the aliens take them again, pull them out from under his ribs one at a time-

“The doctors advised us not to... to try not to let him recollect the event, not yet…” 

Recovery is never easy, whether physical or mental, and for Avon that road was all uphill. His body healed slowly, tissues replacing cell after cell, day by day, but there were things that would never heal, and with those limitations the decision for Avon to stay baseside was made for him. There were things he hadn’t been told by the doctors at first; things that not even Vila had known: Avon was missing a lung, a kidney. Portions of his insides had been removed, stitched back together, tossed inside in a heap that had been its own sort of hell for their doctors to even begin to sort out. It was no wonder he’d taken so long to recover, and as the days wore on, he hit a benchmark from which no further treatment seemed to help. He didn’t feel… the same, but he was alive. What had been taken from him, vitality, energy, endurance, would have been robbed from him with age eventually - this only sped up the process. When Blake revealed what he’d known to Avon, they’d fought - a great row that had echoed through the concrete base until Avon had run out of breath, so much faster than he had before. _They were even_ , in a twisted sort of way. And after all had been said and done, and Blake was walking away slowly with a stitch in his side and a blinding headache, Avon had muttered under his breath that it was only fair. If he’d believed the tales Vila told him about Delta superstition, he might have said it was karma, _cosmic retribution_ … but a fickle universe wouldn’t take its literal pound of flesh so soon. No. He expected worse to come; it was only a matter of time. 

Blake’s technical team had sifted through the data logs from that fateful day and they’d found record of the ship that had stolen Avon away. _Andromedans_ was all they could tell, and as far as Orac could gather there had been no other record of the same ships within their galaxy before or since. Whatever they had been, they were gone now, and with nothing to guide them towards the Andromedans again, there was little they could do. So Blake wiped the tapes and left the information with Orac under voicelock where Avon couldn’t stumble upon it by accident and relive the horrors he was working so hard to forget. 

Vila was helping, steadfast by his side, the voice of reason for Avon when all logic deserted him in the night, when terrors clouded his dreams and made him shake and sweat, biting his hand to stop himself from screaming. Vila would hold him tight in the darkness where it was warm and soft and safe - the opposite of the cage he’d lived in for all those weeks. And Avon would calm eventually, soothed by the gentle stroke of fingers through his damp hair, body relaxing inch by hard-won inch as he let himself down from the height of his delusions, watched the visions fade from his eyes until it was just him and Vila, alone. 

They didn’t know if the dreams would ever really stop - Avon suspected not, and some nights he fought to stay awake just so he wouldn’t remember. But every night, earlier and earlier, fatigue would take him and he would lie in the arms of his love and hope to dream happy dreams he thought he didn’t deserve.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **TW MCD** I'm sorry, but we just couldn't leave it and the story really doesn't need it, but if you want closure - go ahead.

Five years passed by in the blink of an eye. The rebel base grew stronger, Blake carried on, weaker as the days went by, but sustained by Docholli’s regular treatments. He’d helped Avon too, but there were limits even to the best of surgeons, and though he did what he could, they all grew older, faster, as time slipped through their fingers. 

It was a peaceful autumn morning when Vila woke to the sound of Avon coughing hard in the bed beside him. The coming winter played hell on his remaining lung, the dry air no good for breathing, and the chill that pervaded the depths of the base could never quite be staved off by the heaters they’d purloined. Avon curled around Vila at night, the thief’s body like a hot water bottle under the mountain of thin sheets and flat pillows that Avon dug himself into to sleep. 

“You want some water?” Vila pulled himself up and reached for the glass by the bed, groggy, still half asleep, and swore when he found it empty. Reluctantly, he slipped from the covers and padded to the bathroom over cold floors, shaking as his sweat chilled on his skin. Filling the glass, he returned and sat, helping Avon to drink without choking. He spluttered, gulping down a mouthful or two, and pushed the glass away. 

“Thank you-” he choked out and cleared his throat. “That’s better.”

“I should bring in another heater-”

“No, it was air this time,” Avon waved a hand dismissively and gathered the blankets around him tighter, nestling back into the crook of Vila’s arm as he lay back down. “I wasn’t under the covers.”

As he slipped further down and settled, Vila pulled the covers over their heads and tucked them in tight so the humid air inside couldn’t escape. He stuck his own feet out the end, and in the darkness sought out Avon’s lips with his fingers and leaned in carefully for a kiss. 

A harsh wind blew across the surface, whipping up pollen and dust and sweeping it into the base’s ventilation system with startling efficiency. The dry autumn had been hell for the few farmers left on Gauda Prime and had Avon wheezing throughout the day. He was sat in a computer lab deep within the base when his chest first started to clench, tightening on him involuntarily, and the hacking cough he’d been chasing off all morning came back with a vengeance. 

Through his fit, he heard the comm unit beside him chime, and Vila’s cheerful voice came through. 

“Avon - lunch is ready. Meet you in the dining hall?”

Slamming his hand down on the reply button, he swallowed and squeaked out an affirmative. Clean air - that’s what he needed. The walk would do him good. 

Stumbling to his feet, he made his way up the hall, the task almost beyond him by the time he’d reached the foot of the main staircase. He clutched at the steel railings, foot dragging over the first of many steps, and then slipped, swinging around and sliding to the floor gracelessly. His fist clenched, and he grabbed at his chest, pulling the clinging tunic from his skin like it might pull his diaphragm out with it. Avon's chest rose and fell, breathless ache making his head swim, and he barely registered the faces of the people that crowded around him, concerned, panicked, trying to drag him up, ask him questions he couldn’t answer. His mind was swimming, drowning without air, and he gulped uselessly for breaths to keep himself conscious just a little longer. Through the blurring fog, a face he didn’t recognise came into focus, and Avon lunged towards them, wrapped his hands in their shirt and dragged them down to gasp into their ear. 

“Tell Vila- sorry- lunch- getting cold-”

By the time Vila had reached the infirmary, the room had gone quiet. The coughs that echoed down the hallway as he ran had faded, and the gentle murmur of voices seemed to ebb away as he hurtled closer and closer, heart pounding and nausea making him stumble as he careened through the open doorway. 

Docholli didn’t even look up at him when he entered, just pulled the sheet over the bed and walked away. 

“Avon?”

He didn’t even get to say goodbye.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh wait that's not closure.


End file.
